I'll come clean. There's a particular reason for me to be nominating ZZ Top for this slot today. Tomorrow I'll be flying to the US to interview Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, and to see them play at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland. And, yes, I'm insanely excited about it.

Master of Sparks comes from ZZ Top's third album, 1973's Tres Hombres, their first big hit record. I bought it in a mall in Provo, Utah, on a family holiday, largely on the strength of it featuring Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers, which had been covered by Motörhead. I was expecting a metal record. A fortnight later we got home and my first impression was I'd been sold a pup.

First impressions are often wrong, though. It didn't take long for Tres Hombres to insinuate itself into my affections. First came the rockers, Beer Drinkers … and Le Grange. Then the poppier ones – Move Me On Down the Line. But the one that came to fascinate me, and the one I now love best, is Master of Sparks.

It's a spooky song: I think it's a lap steel that quavers away through the verses, giving it the sound of something picked up from some ghostly radio station far off in the lost lands. It feels like it always existed somewhere in the remote vastness of America, a song blown across the deserts and the plains until ZZ Top picked it up and recorded it.

Lyrically, too, it's a perfect little piece – a man is persuaded by his friends to come and see just what's on there minds: "And then I took my first long look/ At the Master of Sparks on high." The Master of Sparks is a race car – maybe a dragster, maybe a stock car, but certainly one that moves "like a stick of rollin' dynamite" – but the way Billy Gibbons sings about it, you'd assume it was a supernatural being at the very least. Nevertheless, it has powers beyond our hero's control, as he discovers in the song's last line. Yes: this is a Sunset Boulevard of a number, narrated from beyond the grave.

I'll beware of invitations to jump into any souped-up roadsters this weekend, O think.